Abstract (inglese)

In their interpretative essay accompanyng the 1996 English translation of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, originally written in Germany in the late 1920s, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make the somewhat provocative claim that “without the historical and conceptual context of the dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin), Arendt’s thought cannot be completely or authentically appropriated. The dissertation is important not simply as a historical artifact from her prepolitical German past but especially as a concurrent, if not directly explanatory, aspect of her political thought in America” . In this way, they present Arendt’s dissertation as an interpretative Key to her later work. Many reviewers of Scott and Stark’s edition of Arendt’s dissertation feel hesitant their enthusiasm. Besides, one must be aware of the fact that their hypothesis effectively implies that people unfamiliar with Arendt’s dissertation cannot completely understand her thought, wich, in fact, would implicate many, if not most, Arendtian scholars, since it is the one work of Arendt’s that has probably been most neglected.
Even if Scott and Stark may have overstated their case, they must be credited with having raised an important question: What is, indeed, the significance of Hannah Arendt’s doctoral dissertation? If , perhaps, it may not be a key with which to unlock otherwise unsolvable riddles in Arendt’s thought, does it really deserve the marginal role that has in fact been assigned to it in the studies of Hannah Arendt’s writings? In this present study, we will argue that an examination of Der Liebesbegriff is worthwhile, even though we must grant that Arendt’s mature work can also be understood without reading it. It is a fact, however, that Arendt’s thought often wanders off onto roads always properly marked as such, so that the question of placing the right emphases is of utmost importance if we want to understand her writings correctly. If there are pervading themes that are present in her writings from beginning to end, these deserve to be highlighted. Thus, an examination of her dissertation will help us to place the right accent marks on her thought. Correct emphases, in turn, will help us to see Arendt’s work as a whole in the proper light. This is the light in which, in the present study, we intend to analyze Arendt’s theory of action and her moral considerations, searching for certain fundamental elements of Arendt’s thought that are already present throughout and that are thus particularly important.
We can safely make the general affirmation that in Arendt’s dissertation, many of her later ideas are already present in rudimentary form. To reveal what these ideas are in particular will precisely be the central task of this present analysis. That indeed there should be some continuity between Arendt’s dissertation and her later thought is already suggested by the sheer fact that Augustine sets the thematic frame of Arendt’s entire work. She begins her academic career with her dissertation on Augustine and ends it with her perhaps most philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, in which Augustine plays again a pivotal role. Indeed, the second to last paragraph Arendt wrote in her lifetime contains a quotation from Augustine. Thus, Remo Bodei is very right when he not only states what any acute reader of Arendt’s would note also points out the symbolic significance of this fact: “Augustine was the exclusive object of Arendt’s first book, and he appears at a conspicuous place in her last one, which she finished in the same year of her death…The span of reflection is thus symbolically brought together under the sign of Augustine” .
The main question Arendt raises in Der Liebesbegriff is how for Augustine a Christian believer who loves God and his mind and heart set on the heavens above is still able to love his neighbor in the world below. Fundamentally, it is a philosophical inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of a coexistence –or even interdipendence- of love of God and love of neighbor in Augustine. If therefore, we want to examine to what extent the rudiments of Arendt’s later thought are already present in her Augustine book, we should limit ourselves to certain aspects of Arendt’s multifaceted intellectual patrimony. The aspects on which Der Liebesbegriff would most likely have a bearing are Arendt’s reflections on action and ethics.
When we imply that Arendt actually developed something like a theory of action or that she was to some extent a moral thinker, we are aware that these are not uncontested claims. Hence, it is important to make certain qualifications.While it is clear that “action” plays a very important role in Arendt’s thought, it is also clear that she did not develop hard and fast definitions by which to understand it. Nonetheless, to speak of Arendt’s reflections on action as a theory of action will be impossible only if we have a very narrow idea of theory, thinking of it as a strictly closed system of thought. But in our opinion it is possible to undertand “theory” also as an open systematizazion of thought, which occurs, for instance, already the moment we make distinctions and which as such will not be alien to Arendt’s mind.
As to the question of an “ethics” in Arendt, similar things can be said. Indeed, she does not present us with a system of norms or rules to be followed, and if this is what we understand by ethics, then there is no ethics to be found in Arendt’s writings. To our mind, at any rate, ethics is a much larger field, in which the questions that Arendt posed and sought to answer ever since she witnessed the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the early 1960s.
We shall consider questions regarding conscience, motivation, and judgment as integral parts of a field or study called “ethics”-which, incidentally, we will hold synonymous with “moral philosophy”. Therefore, we will be in a situation authentically to speak of Hannah Arendt’s “ethics”, “ethical or moral thought”, or “moral philosophy”.
The present study will proceed in the following major steps. First, there will be an examination of Scott and Stark’s edition of Arendt’s dissertation, which has the merit of having brought Arendt’s first book back to scholarly attention. However, I will argue that the work has grave defects, rendering very difficult the English readr’s proper access to Arendt’s original 199 dissertation, which, after all, is the work that Arendt wrote and published herself and that therefore should be of most interest to scholars.
With the second step, we will enter into the main part of our discussion. We will first analyze Arendt’s theory of action, primarily as she presents it to us in The Human Condition. Then, we will examine her principal ideas about ethics, as we can find them mainly in The Life of the Mind. Thus, we will shown Arendt’s mature ideas on action and ethics, we will put them in relation to her argument in her juvenile Der Liebesbegriff.
With the third step, when dealing with action theory or issues relating to moral philosophy, we are discussing things relating to concrete life-situations, and these concrete life-situations will in turn influence thought. Arendt, the disappointed and hurt lover of Heidegger’s, the Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, the stateless èmigrè to America, the controversial journalist, and the respectable professor –all these dimensions of her life are bound to find their way into her thought when she writes about Augustine’s concept of love, about totalitarianism, or about the condition of humanity in post-modernity.